virtualbox.org

twipley wrote:Although I cannot see, at least under fullscreen mode, why would anyone want to prevent VirtualBox from automatically scaling to the highest-possible value, be it either fractional or integer.

Yeah, "auto" would probably work this way and most people would just leave it like that.

I can think of one situation where you would want to set manual scale factor.
If it will be allowed to scale bigger than physical screen size. For example, you have a 1280x1024 monitor, but want to test something on a guest OS at 1920x1200. Guest could be shown with either sliders or forced to less-than 100% scaling.

Note that if < 100% scaling was forced in this case, things might be unreadably small. Instead, if scaling would be allowed with sliders, then one could also use it as an actual magnification feature, to observe a part of guest screen magnified.

VirtualBox is a laboratory for observing the guest so it makes sense that it would allow something like that.

bostjan wrote:VirtualBox is a laboratory for observing the guest so it makes sense that it would allow something like that.

I agree.

I guess my main interrogation was, would that just be cluttering up the GUI? In the sense that, the new user tends to make a "head moving back" gesture when opening up the options pane.

Some things are better left to the command line. I am (or was) not sure where this feature belongs.

twipley wrote:

bostjan wrote:One possible arrangement of options could be this:

1. Checkbox to enable or completely disable scaling.
2. Checkbox/radiobox to select integer scaling or smooth scaling.
3. Checkbox to enable or disable auto scaling. When enabled, exact factor cannot be manually selected (disable section 4.).
4. A control to select exact scaling % factor. In case of integer scaling, select integer number to multiply or divide.

This quote and this ticket https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10852 seem to sum it up very well.

to the devs: I'm curious, is this planned to be implemented to the 5.0 release?

It might make sense to do so, as the scaling module is being worked on. Make it happen, as it is a good time for it!